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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24695053">Good Bones</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/SmallishWormMasterOfTheUniverse/pseuds/SmallishWormMasterOfTheUniverse'>SmallishWormMasterOfTheUniverse</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Body Horror, Canon Compliant, Gen, Gore, Identity loss, Memory Loss, The Archives, The Distortion, The Spiral, gratuitous realty, hallways, if i remembered it right, please enjoy the best-worst-best sex joke i have ever made, so the timeline could be completely wrong, the real spiral here is that i did not review any of canon before i wrote this</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 10:35:42</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,184</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24695053</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/SmallishWormMasterOfTheUniverse/pseuds/SmallishWormMasterOfTheUniverse</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Even in the garish light the remains of the people in the hallways are beautiful. Helen is-was-is a realtor. Helen can tell when something has good bones. Helen can make the necessary improvements.</i> </p><p>Helen redecorates the Spiral.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>41</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Good Bones</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This was inspired by a tumblr post theorizing that Helen had to kill the other people in the Spiral to become its avatar. Unfortunately I cannot remember any specific phrasing to find it, but please hit me up if that was your post and you want credit! (Or if you want me to take this down cause it was your idea and I didn't ask, no worries.)</p><p>Content warnings: Spiral-typical mental confusion, memory and identity loss, body horror, gore, sex mention, animal death mention. Please let me know if I missed anything, my apologies in advance.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Helen’s secret is that she recognized the door. She is-was-is a realtor, after all, and keeping track of minute details in facades and fixtures and furniture is as much a part of her as her bones once were. And the door was not subtle. All seventeen-six-onethousand feet of it was painted over in shifting, swirling neon, the kind of headache-inducing that that threatens to scoop the teeth out of your gums like they’re peach pits. And the handle had been warm and cold and not solid enough to turn in her hand. Yes, Helen had recognized the door.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Helen forgets what it means to have a secret. Helen forgets what it means for something to mean something else. In order to try and keep herself herself Helen thinks in straight lines. This is difficult because the hallways are straight and branchless and yet twist so that Helen has never gone in the same direction twice or maybe even once. The carpet is cheap and waxy, bowling alley or airport type, printed in fractal patterns of two-sided triangles and six-sided squares. Helen tries not to think about it. Helen thinks about all the words she knows that start with the letter S until she forgets what letters are. Helen reviews her times tables until she forgets what numbers are. Helen reminds herself of who she is over and over and over until she forgets that too.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Helen screams because fear is the only thing that makes sense here. Helen screams until blood pours out of her mouth. Helen screams until she can feel sweat running down the inside of her skin. Helen is losing little pieces of herself and they are soaking into the carpet and they are splattering on the walls. She patches herself, moistening plasterboard with spit and pressing it onto the ends of her ribs until they are long and sharp; she stretches her teeth into ribbons. Helen switches her right foot and her left foot and forgets what directions are before she remembers to change them back.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Helen meets other people in the hallways. They are so insubstantial that their skins look like they are made of lace, and she can see through them to where their thoughts hang filmy and suspended like soap bubbles. Helen pops them. They make colors — broken glass and shreds of mica and the smell of rotting fruit. Even in the garish light the remains of the people in the hallways are beautiful. Helen is-was-is a realtor. Helen can tell when something has good bones. Helen can make the necessary improvements. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Helen tears up the bowling alley carpet and replaces it with long looped strings of the phone numbers of childhood best friends. Nostalgia is in right now. She does the fixtures in half-remembered love letters — classic, with enough gaps to let the light shine through. The walls are more difficult to settle on, if anything can ever truly be settled. She tries nightmares (too unstable), wedding vows (too flimsy), and regrets (too cliche) before finally remembering that she still has one last bit of Helen Richardson trapped and screaming in the back of her mind. Helen pulls her out by the neck like a tapeworm and spreads an even layer of her over the hideous wallpaper Michael must have put up. Helen has impeccable taste matched only by her incredible hunger. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Helen kills Michael. Helen saves the Archivist. Helen does a lot of other things that she can’t remember. Helen has never had a very good memory. This used to bother her. When she would find a ticket stub for a movie she could not remember seeing with friends she hadn’t talked to in months she would feel as if her life was disappearing. Helen kept drawers full of ticket stubs and phone numbers and a big calendar with all of her bookings written in capital letters and red ink. In the hallways Helen’s memory is even worse but at least she has finally also forgotten to care about it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Helen replaces the door last. She considers it a crowning achievement, the entrance to her domain, but she keeps it simple, clean lines and a tendency to cause blood pressure to drop severely. She decides to show it to the Archivist. To show him what he can become. (Intellectually, anyway. She doubts she can do anything for the man’s sense of style.) But when Helen steps out of her hallways for the first time in a long time she feels the chill of the archives and then she feels pain. Helen wishes that her pain made sense. If her pain made sense she wouldn’t be able to feel it, but it </span>
  <em>
    <span>doesn’t </span>
  </em>
  <span>make sense because she has destroyed Helen Richardson and yet she is still Helen Richardson, a photo stuck to its negative with pins through it. Helen begs the Archivist to help her. The Archivist will not. The Archivist probably doesn’t know how. Helen stumbles back into her hallways like a cat crawling into a corner to die and writhes on her back on her excellent carpeting until the fear and pain of the hallway’s remaining wanderers swaddle her like a blanket and smother her own. Helen refinishes the walls with family recipes and hopes that the strength of olfactory memory will be enough to keep Helen Richardson locked away.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Helen isn’t sure why she helps the Archivist after that. Maybe she likes the way it keeps him on edge, keeps him wondering what her plan is, mystifies him as to how something he has so firmly categorized as bad could act in a way that seems good. Maybe, she thinks, laughing when she remembers how humans work, she just likes having him inside her. She tells him how the Spiral works, its mechanics. “Have you ever read Edgar Allen Poe, Archivist? ‘I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.’” She makes herself the undercurrent to his thoughts, the half-waking coda to his dreams. When he notices he thinks he has a song stuck in his head. But the part of him that is hungry like her eats until it is sick. Helen can open doors even when there are no walls to put them in.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And Helen is not sure why she went through the door, if she ever was. There are emotions she can name — resignation and fear and anger and hunger and hunger and hunger — but there are no ideas behind them anymore. They could all be the same thing. They could all be nothing. Helen decides that she prefers the names empty, anyway. Helen loves names. Names pretend to categorize things, names act like they can stick. Helen finds them charming. Helen is just waiting now to forget her own name. That one last bit of reupholstering before the pain of losing herself is over and she is complete. She is sure it will happen soon. For now she keeps up with her regular appointments, renovates and refurbishes, finds new clients and loses them. Helen is-was-is a realtor, after all. She has always been very good at her job.</span>
</p>
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